


Darkly Dreaming Delta

by gallyg



Category: BioShock
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-27
Updated: 2015-06-27
Packaged: 2018-04-06 09:26:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4216389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallyg/pseuds/gallyg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Subject Delta reflects on his decisions during his escape from Rapture. Set in the bad ending's continuity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Darkly Dreaming Delta

I have had many names. The one I was born with has long since been lost to history. Down in Rapture, I was Johnny Topside, for a time. It wasn't long before that identity—the man who had found Rapture in a submarine—became inconvenient for the ruling class. At that point, I gained a new name. I don't like to call myself that other name. I don't deserve it. 

Subject Delta, big daddy. It was a sick joke, a twisted parody of parenthood. The truth is I was just a machine, programmed to do one task: protect the girl I was bonded to by the city's deranged scientists, freed from “petty morality,” as they called it. She probed corpses for ADAM, I kept her safe. The funny thing, though? I liked it, and I didn't feel like a bodyguard or a machine. Blame it on the pheromone treatment or the Pair Bond or whatever you want, but the feelings were real. I _was_ her father. What is love, anyway? Just a chemical. The source shouldn't make a difference. None of this mattered, of course. I tended to her every need and I killed anyone who had a problem with that. It didn't matter how I felt about any of this. It was my only choice.

But eventually, a miracle happened to me. Not from karma or God, but from this little girl I was looking after. She loved me just as I had loved her, and she had bigger dreams than wasting her life away in a dying city at the bottom of the ocean. It was a simple plan. Break the conditioning and carve a war path out of the city. Sunlight wouldn't be a distant memory any longer. She'd grown up so suddenly, and now I was the one being saved.

I repaid this, the greatest kindness I've ever been shown, with unspeakable cruelty.

The surface was calling me. Nothing mattered in this world but escaping with my daughter. To every gatherer and protector I crossed, no different from the two of us in another life, I showed no mercy. Survival of the fittest is the law of Rapture, and only our survival mattered. If I'd only known about her bond to the litter sisters... Would I have done things differently? She felt the tear of every stomach wall that got between me and the ADAM I needed so desperately. I was just being pragmatic. I couldn't risk not being strong enough to save us. I did what I had to do.

But that's not quite true, is it? I didn't have to kill Stanley Poole. He deserved to die for what he did, selling her to Fontaine and convincing Ryan that I was a threat to Rapture. How could I let someone like that live? He had wronged me and the only other person who mattered to me. It was justice, maybe, but it was also my perfect revenge. Perhaps I'm just a monster.

For her to follow that example... I was supposed to be the one getting my hands dirty. Watching your child do the same is ugly and perverse. She enjoyed killing those children. I want to tell myself that maybe it's not my fault. For ten years, she was raised by her mother, the tyrannical Dr. Lamb. How much influence could I really have had? Surely she was destined for this path. Nothing I could have done. What a great way to give myself an out. But I know in my heart that if I had found another way, if I had paid forward this miracle I'd been given, things would have turned out differently. Besides, what she did to Dr. Lamb, her own mother... The ecstasy in her voice while she did it...

I don't deserve to be called Subject Delta. That is a big daddy's name. I have failed as a father. That sweet girl named Eleanor I saw wandering around the docks an eternity ago is dead. I killed her. The only thing left to do now is guide this new Eleanor forward. Despite everything, I still love her.


End file.
